B2B Companies Must Adopt AI-Powered Conversation Automation to Meet Customer Expectations, 451 Research Finds

As growth slows for the second quarter in a row, Conversica, Inc., the leading provider of Conversation Automation solutions for enterprise revenue teams, and 451 Research, part of S&P Global, release new data showing those without conversational AI are now far behind in the race to meet rising customer expectations.

AI Assistants Are Now Integral to Digitally-Driven Companies

451 Research surveyed business leaders to define differences between digitally-driven organizations—those with digital transformation strategies currently in place—and their digitally-delayed counterparts, who are behind the curve in creating and adopting digital transformation solutions.

Leaders at digitally-driven companies identified customer experience as a top driver of their digital transformation—and they were twice as likely to invest in Conversational AI as a key component of their strategy. With 78 percent of all respondents exploring conversational technologies to augment their workforce, Conversational AI and digital assistants have become the new table stakes for those focused on growth.

Also Read: Survey – 49% of Consumers Believe Brands Are Neglecting In-App Customer Support

As customer expectations for communications from brands continue to rise, more and more companies adopt conversational technologies to keep pace. Eighty percent of business buyers say they’re likely to end a relationship with a company due to a poor experience. Companies without conversational AI, unable to engage with buyers at the level they expect, will miss out on opportunities. And those stuck using simplistic, linear chatbots that are more suited for support use cases will no longer stand out from the crowd; more advanced AI capabilities are critical to driving revenue success.

“Only Conversica delivers the level of personalized, humanlike, two-way dialog necessary to meet rising customer expectations across the entire buyer’s journey from top of funnel to existing customer advocacy,” said Jim Kaskade, CEO of Conversica. “Standard chatbots have been deployed on every website to help capture new leads. But they are yesterday’s AI—well behind the technology curve. Customers are savvy to simplistic, rules-based bots, so conversational AI solutions absolutely must replicate the experience of communicating with a human to deliver real revenue results. The chatbot is dead. The market demands a concierge who communicates via chat, email, SMS, messaging, social, and voice; holding a consistent and intelligent conversation across all channels and points in their buyer journey.”